Arctic Storm Rising
- Автор: Браун Дейл
- Серия: Nick Flynn #1
- Год: 2021
- Язык: английский
- Год: William Morrow
- ISBN: 9780063015050
- Жанр: Триллеры
Электронная книга - «Arctic Storm Rising». Краткое содержание книги:
Flynn concentrated on putting one snowshoed foot in front of the other. After three days and nearly sixty miles of marching north across this frozen landscape, the rhythm had become second nature to him. His breath puffed out in a little cloud of steam that drifted away on the icy breeze. He looked back at his men. Though their shoulders were bowed down under the weight of their rucksacks, they were all in position in the column and moving easily, almost gracefully, through the snow.
The first day’s march had been the roughest on all of them, except for Andy Takirak. Within the first few miles, every step had been painful and every breath an agony as they sucked in bone-dry air chilled to just above zero. By the time they made camp, his little band of soldiers and airmen were too tired even to bitch about the situation he’d dropped them in. Only the National Guard sergeant had seemed disgustingly cheerful when he prodded them awake the following morning, hours before sunrise. Everyone else had been wrapped in misery, all too aware of aching feet, calves, and shoulders.
That had changed sometime during the second day’s even longer hike. One moment, Flynn felt like all he could do was focus on taking the next painful step — slogging along in an endless procession of discomfort where sheer willpower was the only thing keeping him moving. Then, suddenly, he’d felt his head come up and his shoulders go back. His breathing had eased, too. Oh, his feet and back still hurt… but it no longer mattered. Or at least not as much. A quick check of the march column had showed that the rest of his team was experiencing something similar. Even their usual crappy jokes and banter had started to bounce back and forth again.
“They’re over the hump,” Takirak had said matter-of-factly during their next rest break.
Flynn had nodded, understanding what the older man meant. The “hump” was that almost indefinable psychological moment when you realized that what had seemed impossibly difficult was doable after all. There was a hump somewhere in every challenging situation, and if you managed to get past it you learned a lot about yourself… and the others who’d been there with you.
Like all good things, that brief moment of elation had faded again under the strain of marching so far and so fast. But it lingered inside every man as a source of confidence and renewed strength. They knew now that they were going to make it — that they’d reach Deadhorse on time if they just refused to give up.
A droning roar off to the east brought Flynn’s head up again. There, coming in low, on its final approach to the airport, was an Alaska Air National Guard C-130J turboprop. He glanced at his watch.
From behind him, Mitchell asked, “Is that our ride, sir?”
Flynn nodded, feeling a grin starting to spread on his face. “That it is, Airman. And right on time.” He moved off to the side of the column of marching men and raised his voice. “Well done, guys! You did it.”
Answering smiles spread along the line of weary, unshaven faces. Bringing up the rear, with his light machine gun draped over his shoulder, Hynes pulled down his thermal mask. “Hey, Captain,” he asked. “Is that it? Aren’t you going to make some long, inspiring speech?”
Flynn shook his head. “Hell no, PFC.” He nodded toward the runway, now visible just a few hundred yards ahead of them. The Super Hercules had landed and was taxiing down the strip. “Hear those propellers?”
“Yeah?” Hynes said curiously.
“Well, that’s my speech,” Flynn told him with a laugh. “Know what they sound like to me?”
“Victory?”
“Yep,” Flynn agreed. “Victory… and hot food, showers, and clean sheets.”
That drew whoops and cheers. Hynes and the others grinned even wider. “Roger that, sir!”
Nine
In a whirling flurry of rotor-blown snow, a large twin-engine helicopter settled heavily onto the tundra. Painted white with red stripes, it was a Boeing Vertol 234 heavy-lift helicopter — the civilian version of a military CH-47 Chinook. As its turboshaft engines spooled down, both rotors gradually slowed and then stopped moving. The rear ramp whined down and thudded into the snow, revealing a compartment crammed full with nearly eleven metric tons of cargo. A couple pieces of small construction equipment — walk-behind, smooth-drum, compaction rollers — were strapped down closest to the opening. Large sections of folded white fabric and long aluminum stringers filled the rest of the fuselage from floor to ceiling.
Kept comfortable despite the cold by his fashionable gray-and-blue Rossignol ski jacket, Gore-Tex pants, and waterproof boots, Pavel Voronin strode down the ramp and around to one side of the big helicopter. As it climbed above one of the neighboring peaks, the morning sun threw his shadow far across a dazzling white field.
Several men were already headed his way from out of a clump of dwarf black spruce and willow trees. Behind them, a handful of carefully camouflaged tents nestled among the trees.
Voronin nodded a greeting to their leader, a lean, wiry man carrying a scoped rifle, who trudged up to join him while the rest moved on to start unloading cargo from the helicopter. “Zdravstvuyte, Sergei Bondarovich.”
“Welcome to Voron’ye Pole, Crow Field,” Bondarovich replied. Like the others on this small, covert operations team, he had served in Russia’s elite Spetsnaz special operations forces. Before he left the military to work for Dmitri Grishin and North Star Capital, he had attained the rank of major.
“Crow Field?”
Bondarovich shrugged. “We had to call this place something.”
“True,” Voronin agreed. Almost none of the hundreds of mountains, ridges, valleys, rivers, and streams inside the enormous Arctic National Wildlife Refuge bore official names. The absence of identified places on maps made the wilderness seem even more alien and inaccessible — a trackless region the size of Scotland that was virtually untouched by humans or any of their works and words. But Bondarovich’s choice made sense since the little icebound stream bordering this concealed camp eventually joined one of the rare exceptions to that rule, the Old Crow River. And, he thought, when one considered how North Star planned to use this remote valley, calling it Crow Field was even more apt.
He moved off to the side, making way for the first drum roller as it trundled down the helicopter ramp and turned toward the camp. A shallow trail of densely compacted snow and ice marked its passage across the tundra. Pleased by this first evidence of the construction equipment’s effectiveness, he knelt and pushed at the trail with his gloves. It felt solid, unyielding to the touch.
Voronin got back to his feet. “That should do the trick,” he commented.
“No doubt,” Bondarovich said. “Once you give us the go-ahead to start full-scale operations, we’ll start clearing the valley floor of any obstructions and compacting the snow layer to the required depth.”
“How long will you need?”
Bondarovich pulled at his chin. “Three days at a minimum,” he said. “But more likely four. Or even possibly five. We’re down to only about seven and a half hours of sunlight already, and we lose more than nine minutes every day. If we rig lights to keep working after it gets dark, we could easily blow our cover here.”
Voronin nodded his understanding. There were no other settled places anywhere near this valley. Lights glowing here at night, in what should otherwise be unbroken darkness, would stand out like a sore thumb to any passing aircraft, triggering any number of inconvenient questions. Currently, the local Canadian authorities in the little town of Fort McPherson believed the heavy-lift Vertol 234 helicopter’s job was ferrying supplies north to an environmental group that was supposed to be studying the effects of climate change on the Beaufort Sea coast. Nothing could be allowed to shake that conviction, especially with Grishin and Petrov’s high-risk, high-reward plan moving rapidly to fruition.